Millions of Americans have ancestors who immigrated to the US from
Europe and took the Erie Canal to get to Great Lakes steamboats and settle
the midwest. The mighty city of Chicago, for example, was a direct
beneficiary of population brought by the canal.

Most of you also know, from the songs you learned in grade school, that
the canal began in Albany and ended in Buffalo, NY, where I live, and was
built with a large amount of Irish labor.

A little history about where the canal ended in Buffalo: our canal
district, virtually in the shadow of our City Hall, was perhaps the most
notorious and seamy waterfront in the whole country. The
innocent-sounding song, "Buffalo Gals (Won't You Come Out Tonight)," is
actually about prostitutes, because Buffalo's Canal Street was lined with
brothels.

The district was densely populated with the newest immigrants (Irish,
Polish, Italian) and the desperately poor. Disease was epidemic, brawling
and murder was common. Paradoxically, alongside the horrific tenements
and factories was some of the highest-valued real estate in the country,
where 19th century shipping and railroad companies had lavish (for the
time) corporate headquarters.

It is likely that fugitive slaves found refuge in the canal district, for
there was at least one Black-owned tavern/brothel there before the Civil
War, and Buffalo's position on the Niagara River permitted easy crossing
over to Canada. Buffalo was an important link on the Underground Railroad.

The area was enough of a local scandal for so long that it was seen as
an overdue civic improvement to bulldoze the then "blighted" canal
district in the late 1930s and build public housing highrises instead.

These apartments still stand, but under the asphalt parking lots
surrounding them are the original street network, foundation walls for the
Commercial Slip (the original terminus of the Erie Canal) and some
building foundation walls. There may also be railroad tracks and wharf
pilings.

Long story short, along comes the Empire State Development Corp. (ESDC), a
quasi-governmental agency, to "develop" Buffalo's languishing waterfront. Their
plan pays no heed to the architectural, transportation, or social history of the
12 acre site and is full of park-like features that were foreign to 19th century
commercial Buffalo, such as curving landscaped walkways, insipid plazas, fake
canal slips. To build this plan requires bulldozing what remains of the original
district.

This travesty-in-progress needs national attention, for the Erie Canal is
arguably the most famous canal in the world and played a key role in populating
the continental US. Will tourists, many of whom know that their ancestors
traveled the canal, come to see a fake "attraction" that bears no resemblance to
history? Will travelers following Underground Railroad routes be satisfied with
mere signage and photos of what once was?